Do You Describe Yourself as Beautiful?

We’ve talked a lot about what the media puts forward, but now I would really like to break that down in the sense of how it relates to a woman’s inner self. I would first like to start out with a video from Dove. This video shows women describing their looks to an FBI artist. Then a different person comes in and describes the same person. The differences in the pictures, even though they were described about the same person are surprising.

As you saw by the video, those women were not generous in the way they described themselves. We could credit that to a possible modesty or we could also say that they do not picture themselves as beautiful. In fact, Dove created a study in ten different countries to see how comfortable women were with describing their looks and if they were satisfied with those looks called “The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report”

One of the interesting things about this report is the fact that women tend to not use the word “beautiful” to describe themselves. Instead they turn to words such as natural (31%) or average (29%) (“The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report” 9). Only a small 2% described themselves as beautiful and 4/10 women strongly agreed to feeling uncomfortable using that word for their own looks (“The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report” 11).

The majority of females remain “somewhat satisfied” with their beauty (58%), physical attractiveness (59%), and facial attractiveness (58%) (“The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report” 19). These women are likely to be the group most receptive to the media’s portrayal of beauty, because even though they have some satisfaction with how they look, the also believe they could be more satisfied (“The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report” 20). In my next post I hope I will offer some solutions to the media’s portrayal of beauty.